Chapter 6

As we strolled slowly back toward the boat, planning and discussing this, we

were suddenly startled by a loud and unmistakable detonation.

“A shell from the _U_-33!” exclaimed von Schoenvorts.

“What can be after signifyin’?” queried Olson.

“They are in trouble,” I answered for all, “and it’s up to us to get back to

them. Drop that carcass,” I directed the men carrying the meat, “and follow

me!” I set off at a rapid run in the direction of the harbor.

We ran for the better part of a mile without hearing anything more from the

direction of the harbor, and then I reduced the speed to a walk, for the

exercise was telling on us who had been cooped up for so long in the confined

interior of the _U_-33. Puffing and panting, we plodded on until within

about a mile of the harbor we came upon a sight that brought us all up

standing. We had been passing through a little heavier timber than was usual to

this part of the country, when we suddenly emerged into an open space in the

center of which was such a band as might have caused the most courageous to

pause. It consisted of upward of five hundred individuals representing several

species closely allied to man. There were anthropoid apes and gorillas—these I

had no difficulty in recognizing; but there were other forms which I had never

before seen, and I was hard put to it to say whether they were ape or man. Some

of them resembled the corpse we had found upon the narrow beach against

Caprona’s sea-wall, while others were of a still lower type, more nearly

resembling the apes, and yet others were uncannily manlike, standing there

erect, being less hairy and possessing better shaped heads.

There was one among the lot, evidently the leader of them, who bore a close

resemblance to the so-called Neanderthal man of La Chapelle-aux-Saints. There

was the same short, stocky trunk upon which rested an enormous head habitually

bent forward into the same curvature as the back, the arms shorter than the

legs, and the lower leg considerably shorter than that of modern man, the knees

bent forward and never straightened. This creature and one or two others who

appeared to be of a lower order than he, yet higher than that of the apes,

carried heavy clubs; the others were armed only with giant muscles and fighting

fangs—nature’s weapons. All were males, and all were entirely naked; nor was

there upon even the highest among them a sign of ornamentation.

At sight of us they turned with bared fangs and low growls to confront us. I

did not wish to fire among them unless it became absolutely necessary, and so I

started to lead my party around them; but the instant that the Neanderthal man

guessed my intention, he evidently attributed it to cowardice upon our part,

and with a wild cry he leaped toward us, waving his cudgel above his head. The

others followed him, and in a minute we should have been overwhelmed. I gave

the order to fire, and at the first volley six of them went down, including the

Neanderthal man. The others hesitated a moment and then broke for the trees,

some running nimbly among the branches, while others lost themselves to us

between the boles. Both von Schoenvorts and I noticed that at least two of the

higher, manlike types took to the trees quite as nimbly as the apes, while

others that more nearly approached man in carriage and appearance sought safety

upon the ground with the gorillas.

An examination disclosed that five of our erstwhile opponents were dead and the

sixth, the Neanderthal man, was but slightly wounded, a bullet having glanced

from his thick skull, stunning him. We decided to take him with us to camp, and

by means of belts we managed to secure his hands behind his back and place a

leash around his neck before he regained consciousness. We then retraced our

steps for our meat being convinced by our own experience that those aboard the

_U_-33 had been able to frighten off this party with a single shell—but

when we came to where we had left the deer it had disappeared.

On the return journey Whitely and I preceded the rest of the party by about a

hundred yards in the hope of getting another shot at something edible, for we

were all greatly disgusted and disappointed by the loss of our venison. Whitely

and I advanced very cautiously, and not having the whole party with us, we

fared better than on the journey out, bagging two large antelope not a

half-mile from the harbor; so with our game and our prisoner we made a cheerful

return to the boat, where we found that all were safe. On the shore a little

north of where we lay there were the corpses of twenty of the wild creatures

who had attacked Bradley and his party in our absence, and the rest of whom we

had met and scattered a few minutes later.

We felt that we had taught these wild ape-men a lesson and that because of it

we would be safer in the future—at least safer from them; but we decided not to

abate our carefulness one whit, feeling that this new world was filled with

terrors still unknown to us; nor were we wrong.

The following morning we commenced work upon our camp, Bradley, Olson, von

Schoenvorts, Miss La Rue, and I having sat up half the night discussing the

matter and drawing plans. We set the men at work felling trees, selecting for

the purpose jarrah, a hard, weather-resisting timber which grew in profusion

near by. Half the men labored while the other half stood guard, alternating

each hour with an hour off at noon. Olson directed this work. Bradley, von

Schoenvorts and I, with Miss La Rue’s help, staked out the various buildings

and the outer wall. When the day was done, we had quite an array of logs nicely

notched and ready for our building operations on the morrow, and we were all

tired, for after the buildings had been staked out we all fell in and helped

with the logging—all but von Schoenvorts. He, being a Prussian and a gentleman,

couldn’t stoop to such menial labor in the presence of his men, and I didn’t

see fit to ask it of him, as the work was purely voluntary upon our part. He

spent the afternoon shaping a swagger-stick from the branch of jarrah and

talking with Miss La Rue, who had sufficiently unbent toward him to notice his

existence.

We saw nothing of the wild men of the previous day, and only once were we

menaced by any of the strange denizens of Caprona, when some frightful

nightmare of the sky swooped down upon us, only to be driven off by a fusillade

of bullets. The thing appeared to be some variety of pterodactyl, and what with

its enormous size and ferocious aspect was most awe-inspiring. There was

another incident, too, which to me at least was far more unpleasant than the

sudden onslaught of the prehistoric reptile. Two of the men, both Germans, were

stripping a felled tree of its branches. Von Schoenvorts had completed his

swagger-stick, and he and I were passing close to where the two worked.

One of them threw to his rear a small branch that he had just chopped off, and

as misfortune would have it, it struck von Schoenvorts across the face. It

couldn’t have hurt him, for it didn’t leave a mark; but he flew into a terrific

rage, shouting: “Attention!” in a loud voice. The sailor immediately

straightened up, faced his officer, clicked his heels together and saluted.

“Pig!” roared the Baron, and struck the fellow across the face, breaking his

nose. I grabbed von Schoenvorts’ arm and jerked him away before he could strike

again, if such had been his intention, and then he raised his little stick to

strike me; but before it descended the muzzle of my pistol was against his

belly and he must have seen in my eyes that nothing would suit me better than

an excuse to pull the trigger. Like all his kind and all other bullies, von

Schoenvorts was a coward at heart, and so he dropped his hand to his side and

started to turn away; but I pulled him back, and there before his men I told

him that such a thing must never again occur—that no man was to be struck or

otherwise punished other than in due process of the laws that we had made and

the court that we had established. All the time the sailor stood rigidly at

attention, nor could I tell from his expression whether he most resented the

blow his officer had struck him or my interference in the gospel of the

Kaiser-breed. Nor did he move until I said to him: “Plesser, you may return to

your quarters and dress your wound.” Then he saluted and marched stiffly off

toward the _U_-33.

Just before dusk we moved out into the bay a hundred yards from shore and

dropped anchor, for I felt that we should be safer there than elsewhere. I also

detailed men to stand watch during the night and appointed Olson officer of the

watch for the entire night, telling him to bring his blankets on deck and get

what rest he could. At dinner we tasted our first roast Caprona antelope, and

we had a mess of greens that the cook had found growing along the stream. All

during the meal von Schoenvorts was silent and surly.

After dinner we all went on deck and watched the unfamiliar scenes of a

Capronian night—that is, all but von Schoenvorts. There was less to see than to

hear. From the great inland lake behind us came the hissing and the screaming

of countless saurians. Above us we heard the flap of giant wings, while from

the shore rose the multitudinous voices of a tropical jungle—of a warm, damp

atmosphere such as must have enveloped the entire earth during the Palezeoic

and Mesozoic eras. But here were intermingled the voices of later eras—the

scream of the panther, the roar of the lion, the baying of wolves and a

thunderous growling which we could attribute to nothing earthly but which one

day we were to connect with the most fearsome of ancient creatures.

One by one the others went to their rooms, until the girl and I were left alone

together, for I had permitted the watch to go below for a few minutes, knowing

that I would be on deck. Miss La Rue was very quiet, though she replied

graciously enough to whatever I had to say that required reply. I asked her if

she did not feel well.

“Yes,” she said, “but I am depressed by the awfulness of it all. I feel of so

little consequence—so small and helpless in the face of all these myriad

manifestations of life stripped to the bone of its savagery and brutality. I

realize as never before how cheap and valueless a thing is life. Life seems a

joke, a cruel, grim joke. You are a laughable incident or a terrifying one as

you happen to be less powerful or more powerful than some other form of life

which crosses your path; but as a rule you are of no moment whatsoever to

anything but yourself. You are a comic little figure, hopping from the cradle

to the grave. Yes, that is our trouble—we take ourselves too seriously; but

Caprona should be a sure cure for that.” She paused and laughed.

“You have evolved a beautiful philosophy,” I said. “It fills such a longing in

the human breast. It is full, it is satisfying, it is ennobling. What wondrous

strides toward perfection the human race might have made if the first man had

evolved it and it had persisted until now as the creed of humanity.”

“I don’t like irony,” she said; “it indicates a small soul.”

“What other sort of soul, then, would you expect from ‘a comic little figure

hopping from the cradle to the grave’?” I inquired. “And what difference does

it make, anyway, what you like and what you don’t like? You are here for but an

instant, and you mustn’t take yourself too seriously.”

She looked up at me with a smile. “I imagine that I am frightened and blue,”

she said, “and I know that I am very, very homesick and lonely.” There was

almost a sob in her voice as she concluded. It was the first time that she had

spoken thus to me. Involuntarily, I laid my hand upon hers where it rested on

the rail.

“I know how difficult your position is,” I said; “but don’t feel that you are

alone. There is—is one here who—who would do anything in the world for you,” I

ended lamely. She did not withdraw her hand, and she looked up into my face

with tears on her cheeks and I read in her eyes the thanks her lips could not

voice. Then she looked away across the weird moonlit landscape and sighed.

Evidently her new-found philosophy had tumbled about her ears, for she was

seemingly taking herself seriously. I wanted to take her in my arms and tell

her how I loved her, and had taken her hand from the rail and started to draw

her toward me when Olson came blundering up on deck with his bedding.

The following morning we started building operations in earnest, and things

progressed finely. The Neanderthal man was something of a care, for we had to

keep him in irons all the time, and he was mighty savage when approached; but

after a time he became more docile, and then we tried to discover if he had a

language. Lys spent a great deal of time talking to him and trying to draw him

out; but for a long while she was unsuccessful. It took us three weeks to build

all the houses, which we constructed close by a cold spring some two miles from

the harbor.

We changed our plans a trifle when it came to building the palisade, for we

found a rotted cliff near by where we could get all the flat building-stone we

needed, and so we constructed a stone wall entirely around the buildings. It

was in the form of a square, with bastions and towers at each corner which

would permit an enfilading fire along any side of the fort, and was about one

hundred and thirty-five feet square on the outside, with walls three feet thick

at the bottom and about a foot and a half wide at the top, and fifteen feet

high. It took a long time to build that wall, and we all turned in and helped

except von Schoenvorts, who, by the way, had not spoken to me except in the

line of official business since our encounter—a condition of armed neutrality

which suited me to a T. We have just finished it, the last touches being put on

today. I quit about a week ago and commenced working on this chronicle for our

strange adventures, which will account for any minor errors in chronology which

may have crept in; there was so much material that I may have made some

mistakes, but I think they are but minor and few.

I see in reading over the last few pages that I neglected to state that Lys

finally discovered that the Neanderthal man possessed a language. She has

learned to speak it, and so have I, to some extent. It was he—his name he says

is Am, or Ahm—who told us that this country is called Caspak. When we asked him

how far it extended, he waved both arms about his head in an all-including

gesture which took in, apparently, the entire universe. He is more tractable

now, and we are going to release him, for he has assured us that he will not

permit his fellows to harm us. He calls us Galus and says that in a short time

he will be a Galu. It is not quite clear to us what he means. He says that

there are many Galus north of us, and that as soon as he becomes one he will go

and live with them.

Ahm went out to hunt with us yesterday and was much impressed by the ease with

which our rifles brought down antelopes and deer. We have been living upon the

fat of the land, Ahm having shown us the edible fruits, tubers and herbs, and

twice a week we go out after fresh meat. A certain proportion of this we dry

and store away, for we do not know what may come. Our drying process is really

smoking. We have also dried a large quantity of two varieties of cereal which

grow wild a few miles south of us. One of these is a giant Indian maize—a lofty

perennial often fifty and sixty feet in height, with ears the size of a man’s

body and kernels as large as your fist. We have had to construct a second store

house for the great quantity of this that we have gathered.

_September_ 3, 1916: Three months ago today the torpedo from the

_U_-33 started me from the peaceful deck of the American liner upon the

strange voyage which has ended here in Caspak. We have settled down to an

acceptance of our fate, for all are convinced that none of us will ever see the

outer world again. Ahm’s repeated assertions that there are human beings like

ourselves in Caspak have roused the men to a keen desire for exploration. I

sent out one party last week under Bradley. Ahm, who is now free to go and come

as he wishes, accompanied them. They marched about twenty-five miles due west,

encountering many terrible beasts and reptiles and not a few manlike creatures

whom Ahm sent away. Here is Bradley’s report of the expedition:

Marched fifteen miles the first day, camping on the bank of a large stream

which runs southward. Game was plentiful and we saw several varieties which we

had not before encountered in Caspak. Just before making camp we were charged

by an enormous woolly rhinoceros, which Plesser dropped with a perfect shot. We

had rhinoceros-steaks for supper. Ahm called the thing “Atis.” It was almost a

continuous battle from the time we left the fort until we arrived at camp. The

mind of man can scarce conceive the plethora of carnivorous life in this lost

world; and their prey, of course, is even more abundant.

The second day we marched about ten miles to the foot of the cliffs. Passed

through dense forests close to the base of the cliffs. Saw manlike creatures

and a low order of ape in one band, and some of the men swore that there was a

white man among them. They were inclined to attack us at first; but a volley

from our rifles caused them to change their minds. We scaled the cliffs as far

as we could; but near the top they are absolutely perpendicular without any

sufficient cleft or protuberance to give hand or foot-hold. All were

disappointed, for we hungered for a view of the ocean and the outside world. We

even had a hope that we might see and attract the attention of a passing ship.

Our exploration has determined one thing which will probably be of little value

to us and never heard of beyond Caprona’s walls—this crater was once entirely

filled with water. Indisputable evidence of this is on the face of the cliffs.

Our return journey occupied two days and was as filled with adventure as usual.

We are all becoming accustomed to adventure. It is beginning to pall on us. We

suffered no casualties and there was no illness.

I had to smile as I read Bradley’s report. In those four days he had doubtless

passed through more adventures than an African big-game hunter experiences in a

lifetime, and yet he covered it all in a few lines. Yes, we are becoming

accustomed to adventure. Not a day passes that one or more of us does not face

death at least once. Ahm taught us a few things that have proved profitable and

saved us much ammunition, which it is useless to expend except for food or in

the last recourse of self-preservation. Now when we are attacked by large

flying reptiles we run beneath spreading trees; when land carnivora threaten

us, we climb into trees, and we have learned not to fire at any of the

dinosaurs unless we can keep out of their reach for at least two minutes after

hitting them in the brain or spine, or five minutes after puncturing their

hearts—it takes them so long to die. To hit them elsewhere is worse than

useless, for they do not seem to notice it, and we had discovered that such

shots do not kill or even disable them.

_September_ 7, 1916: Much has happened since I last wrote. Bradley is away

again on another exploration expedition to the cliffs. He expects to be gone

several weeks and to follow along their base in search of a point where they

may be scaled. He took Sinclair, Brady, James, and Tippet with him. Ahm has

disappeared. He has been gone about three days; but the most startling thing I

have on record is that von Schoenvorts and Olson while out hunting the other

day discovered oil about fifteen miles north of us beyond the sandstone cliffs.

Olson says there is a geyser of oil there, and von Schoenvorts is making

preparations to refine it. If he succeeds, we shall have the means for leaving

Caspak and returning to our own world. I can scarce believe the truth of it. We

are all elated to the seventh heaven of bliss. Pray God we shall not be

disappointed.

I have tried on several occasions to broach the subject of my love to Lys; but

she will not listen.